I Think My Hard Drive Is Failing


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Well, I was on the internet just monkeying around and I wanted to listen to some Dream Theater. Well I click the Winamp icon. Uh oh, it won't start. OK not a prob I'll just Ctrl+Alt+Del and close it it and try again. Same thing. OK. Well I close the Firefox window I had open and now it won't start. Crap. I'll reboot the computer. OK it's taking way too long, push the restart button on the case. Well now, I haven't seen this in ages, the little white bar at the bottom of the screen. Crap. It's taking forever. Ok Windows XP Logo, it's taking forever, Windows XP Welcome screen. Ok it's been up for 5 minutes, oh wait finally my Civic Type R background, but no icons yet, it's been about 15 minutes since I've tried to restart it and still no icons up yet. I can hear the drive reading very little every little bit. It's always been a loud seeker like my 2 old Seagates (2 and 3GB and both still work). Still no icons or start bar. Dang. I think I'll grab my Vista Beta 2 drive and try to use it to recover some stuff but I'm gonna need a SATA drive to do it.

So does this sound like a failing Hard Drive? It does to me. Thank you god I have my laptop and my back-up Compaq. Only problem is............................I HAVE 110GB of ANIME ON THAT DRIVE!!!!!. CRAP!!!!! Luckily all of My Documents is on my secondary drive along with only like 20GB of anime on it. Damn this sucks.

Oh looky here there's the Start bar. Holy crap some icons just showed up. Yeah I think I'm gonna go grab the Vista Beta 2 drive outta my Compaq and use it until I can back up all this stuff on the new Drive I should be ordering tonight.

U oh, that task bar is the Windows classic one and not all my icons have shown yet. No back ground tasks have loaded yet. This is taking Forever, something is broke. I knew leaving that thing on all night for so long to download stuff was gonna have consequences.

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Thanks to to my secondary drive all My Documents is fine, it's just my main drive has more space so I kept most of my anime on it. And I just started doing DVD backups of em too. Only 4 series got backed up and they are just lesser series that aren't as good as the rest. :( (I have nearly 60 series in total with more than 40 of them on the main drive)

Well I was gonna order a 250GB SATA drive anyway but I intended to transfer all my anime to it and use it as a Video drive. Now it's gonna hafta be my main drive. I think I might order 2 so one can be Windows and games and one can be video. If I'm lucky I can still save all my anime, it'll just take probably a week or 2 to transfer with as slow as it's goin. Thank you lord I had them stored in the DivX Video folder that isn't set to private.

I'm havin a heck of a time finding my Vista Beta 2 disc. I was gonna use Vista until the new drive arrived but I may just have to break out the XP disc.

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yes TT "s

scan works

as ive just done it my self

and the scan says my hdd is failing

ive emailed maxtor

and if you look at the return email i posted

maxtor explains the reasons for a failing hdd

try TT fix it isnt to bad

my scan only went to 50percent

marty

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That's what I just ordered. :thumbsup:

Western Digital Caviar SE16 SATA 3.0GB 16MB Cache. Flippin' sweet.

I've had 3 WD's, 2 Seagates, 1 Samsung (thank you jimras), and one Hitachi. All of them but the Hitachi are older than the Maxtor and they all still work. The Hitachi (in my lappy) has survived me dropping the laptop on a tile floor and carrying it to school which includes me going over rough train tracks (often at 45-50MPH cause I'm always late) and me just slinging around like a college student would at school and it's about a year old. The Maxtor - 2, both Seagates - 9, two of the WD's - 6, the other - 3, the Samsung - not entirely sure but I'm guessing a little more than 2.

Maxtor sucks, it's WD and Seagate from now on.

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Well here I am with Vista Beta 2. I just didn't wanna have to install the exact same copy of Windows twice in 2-3 days so I figured I'd monkey with Vista a little more. I hope the retail version is better cause I can't half navigate cause complexity was added where it shouldn't have been and it's confusing me a little. Oh well I only have to put up with it for a few days or I could just not use it all and stay on my laptop but my secondary 80GB drive on this thing has some of my anime on it.

Can't wait for that new super duper 250GB SATA drive to get here. This 20GB is slow especially with Vista on it.

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seagate and maxtor are the same

at least thats what the email says

seagate has bought into maxtor

is that correct

marty

Thats what to word is Marty. Personally I have never had any problems with Maxtor. I have used them since,well forever.

Non-Ricer boy, Have you checked the cable on the drive? I had the same thing happen to an older gentleman's PC when I was resetting it up for him. It was taking forever to boot. I just decided to shut it down and check the cables. Turns out the cable was loose.

If cable is loose, Power Max can give errors.

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Unless it just popped out I don't see how it can be loose but I might give it another whack. But PowerMax Failed it almost immediately and said the drive was failing and that I need to back up what I can if I can.

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Don't forget the old trick of putting the hard drive in the freezer for a while. It really does work for getting stuff of a failing drive. One guy did it and was so happy with the results, he decided to keep on using it. Wouldn't you know 2 days later it puked. It will make a drive usable though long enough to back up data

Mark

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Attach an extra IDE cable (slave end) to the drive (jumpered as slave) then stick the drive into a ziplock freezer bag with the IDE cable hanging out. Seal the bag the best you can (use tape to seal around the cable). Wrap a towel around the ziplock bag and place it in the freezer for a couple of hours. Make your new drive has XP installed. When you are ready to transfer the data unplug the IDE cable from the motherboard to the new drive and install the cooled hard drive and IDE cable in the computer. Make sure the new hard drive is jumpered to recognize a slaved drive. Get your data transferred as fast as possible. You might be able to refreeze the old drive one or two more times before it gives up.

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OK so I'm going to be using a SATA drive. After going through the freezing process, I should setup the Maxtor as a secondary (slave) and try my dernedest to transfer 110GB of anime over to the new SATA (which is gonna have windows on it), right?

Edited by Honda_Boy
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Well I think I might can recover all my anime without freezin the drive. It seems to be workin fine right now. Maybe the IDE cable was loose. I got the Maxtor set as slave by itself on the IDE0 Channel with the WD SATA as Master on the IDE2 (SATA0) channel. My stuff is copying over right now.

*but it's gonna take forever

**hour in and a little more than 40GB transfered. a little more the 60GB to go.

Edited by Honda_Boy
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Phew, it took forever but I was able to recover the vast majority of it. Only 8 videos didn't make it. Of course that's out of 600 and something that were being transfered. I also transfered the videos I had on my secondary drive and now I'm at over 800 files. Now you know why I wanted so desperately to recover them. That's a lot downloadin right there.

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Spinrite works great to recover bad sectors. On a very low level it uses an algorithm to piece together the data. I have had windows drives that were so corrupted they would not boot, after running spinrite they booted right up.

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it was saying something like redundancy errors with these 8 files but I'm just redownloading them. So it's all good. I got put the hard drive back in to recover my bookmarks for Firefox. I can just get the ones from the Laptop (there are actually more on the laptop) but I had some on the Maxtor that were different

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